


synchromesh

by foolish_mortal



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 06:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I should let you know that MI6 is not in the habit of ceding to terrorists," Q tells him with chilly poise. "But it is after hours, and this is at least a halfway decent kidnapping."<br/>Bond's answering hum of amusement resonates and mingles with the sound of the revving engine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jaguar

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to skuu for the beta!
> 
> This story is actually derived from a large WIP of a story that I might post later on as a director's cut version. 
> 
> Gorgeous art by chosenfire. You can find it [here]()! It's so beautiful!
> 
> I also took the U.K. driving test as part of the wheat googling I did for this story. You can find those [here](http://foolishmortal.tumblr.com/post/59973795573/i-took-a-u-k-driving-test-as-research-for-one-of) and [here](http://foolishmortal.tumblr.com/post/59973853398/i-took-a-u-k-driving-test-as-research-for-one-of).

Q is a fixture in the Q-branch lab at odd hours of the night because his body is simply tuned to the prime coding hours from midnight to 5AM. MI6 isn't embroiled in the middle of an international crisis at the moment, so the only other people in the lab are Boothroyd and an engineer on loan from Naicho who hasn't adjusted to the time difference yet. She's working on some kind of micro-explosive, and her workbench is all over with black scorch marks. Their department certainly attracts a type.

Q's own workbench is littered with empty crisp packets and sandwich crumbs, and it's a godsend that he has such a quicksilver metabolism or he would need an anti-gravity belt like that man from Dune. He's been trying to cut out the crisps anyway, not at all because Bond mentioned his spots. Not that he has spots.

Q startles as his phone rings, and his fingers smash an unintelligible string of letters across the screen. Boothroyd laughs but not unkindly, and Q scowls at him.

Speak of the devil. The caller id on the screen says 007, and Q wonders what Bond has destroyed this time. He puts the phone to his ear and resumes typing. "Q-branch, Q speaking."

"How soon can you be in Upminster?"

Q settles back into his chair. Ever since the incident with Silva, Bond has been on suspension till he’s able to legitimately pass his examinations, and he's been puttering around London making a nuisance of himself in the meantime. No one has the courage to tell Bond that domestic affairs are not his milieu.

"I would hazard not at all since the tube is closed." It's amazing that Bond doesn't know these tiny mundane details, but he's probably never taken the train unless he's ridden on top of it. To be fair, Q didn't know Bond would take 'get on the train' quite so literally.

Bond makes an impatient noise. "Take a company car—"

"I don't know how to drive."

Silence on the other end.

"Hello?" Q clutches the phone closer to his ear. "Hello, Bond? Have you _fainted_?"

Now Bond's voice is chiding. "Still got your L-plate, have you?"

Bond has seized the opportunity to mock him. Q wonders if Bond will ever tire of the age jokes. "It's London," he says shortly. "Why on earth would I learn to drive?"

"To get to Upminster."

Q rolls his eyes. "I can work remotely. I'll just go through the camera in your mobile if I need visuals."

"I would really rather you came in person."

He can tell Bond isn't pleased, but he can't bring himself to care. It isn't his job to cater to Bond's every whim. "Is it that important?"

Bond's voice goes curiously light as it does when he's staring down the barrel of a gun. "It seems our friend Mr. Silva has a copycat with a few hundred pounds of explosives. I believe I've just triggered the timer."

"Oh, is that it?" Q says with forced relief. "Get out your bomb kit and your camera phone. I'll help you disarm it."

"Yes, Q," Bond says obediently, and Q can tell when he's being laughed at. It would make him doubt the severity of the threat if Bond hadn’t demanded he come in person.

Bond is not an accurate measuring stick for the proper reaction to weapons of mass destruction. Bond, who walks around regularly with five weapons on his person and who took the event of his own death with indifferent grace. Bond with his steady hands as he's preparing to defuse a bomb that could destroy an entire London borough. Q is forced to carry the burden of nerves for the both of them.

“Pay attention, 007,” he orders with more irritation than he really feels and begins rattling off bomb diffusion protocols.

The Naicho engineer disappears in a cloud of ash and gunpowder at three in the morning. At five o’clock, Boothroyd hangs up whatever gun he's designing to catch the first train home. Urban legend has it that Boothroyd was hired after he called MI6 to report the inferior quality of their firearms via earpiece he'd lifted off a field agent that he had incapacitated with a well-placed flowerpot to the head. Boothroyd is a special brand of old school ex-military.

He nods at Q on the way out and drops what turns out to be a partially crushed Toffee Crisp on top of Q's keyboard. He's a good man, Boothroyd. Old as Methuselah and knows more about weapons than Q is strictly comfortable with, but Q has become accustomed to living in fear of his subordinates. He suspects they only let him think he's in charge because he pretends he doesn't know what they get up to when he's away. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

He takes a bite of the candy bar and watches the numbers on the bomb wind perilously close to single digits. The wrapper crinkles near his microphone, and he sees Bond's magnified fingers pause on the delicate wires inside the bomb casing.

"You're eating at a time like this?" Bond's voice is carefully neutral, but a bead of sweat falls from his forehead to the back of a hand that is currently holding apart a very crucial triggering mechanism. The camera is close enough to pick out the blue traces of veins in Bond’s hands.

"Almost done. Orange wire," Q says indistinctly around another mouthful of chocolate and nougat. "No, the other— _not that one._ The wire you were just touchi—yes."

The bomb winks off with a beep. Very anti-climatic. Q thinks they would have a considerably worse time of it if their enemies stopped adding countdown clocks and beeping sounds to their detonation systems, and there's a joke in there somewhere, but he's too tired to suss it out so he just snorts.

"What are you laughing about?" Bond asks.

"Nothing. Bombs," Q croaks. His voice has gone hoarse from talking, and his mug is empty and stained with the remnants of a thousand teas, each thinner and fouler than the last. He tips it back for the last drop, and it tastes like death on his tongue. He wonders if the lingering taste of terrible commissary tea has been permanently branded into his mouth, and if this is why he has been a bachelor since he was hired.

"Bombs?" Bond says doubtfully.

"Boom," Q supplies and then lets out a peal of hysterical laugh, because it dawns on him that he's been working in MI6 for the last three years without the smallest proprietary touch of another human being. He knows no one outside of his colleagues, and office romances are not advised in MI6. For one thing, they end up being short-lived in all senses of the word.

"Q, go home. Sleep. In that order," Bond says. He sounds almost _fond_.

"Mm hm," Q replies and puts his head down for just a moment to rest his eyes.

It's almost eleven in the morning when he opens his eyes next, and someone has draped his mustard yellow cardigan around his shoulders like a blanket.

 

If you ask ten different people at MI6 to describe Bond, they'll give ten different answers.

Bond is a hero. A criminal. A dead man walking. He's the right hand of the secret service and the left hand of death. A touchstone and a disgrace. A force of nature. He's the prodigal son struggling back into the fold. (Q doesn't believe this one, because Bond wouldn't know the meaning of contrition if he were handed a dictionary.)

They say Bond is an attack dog on a short leash. A war criminal. He's died—quite literally died—for MI6's sins and then resurrected again like a messiah. Or perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein's monster. He's an indefatigable lover, an unstoppable killer, and mixes the best damn martini anyone's ever tasted. Q likes that one best because it appeals to the secret romantic in him.

But when Q thinks of Bond he thinks of the bitter winter of 1812 and Napoleon's invasion of Russia. He thinks of the Russians razing their own crops and destroying their cities rather than see it taken by the invading French. How they released their own criminals into the streets. He thinks of them giving up their scorched earth meanly, strategically, inch by inch. Their vicious guerrilla warfare across a land that was desolate and ruined and _theirs_. He thinks of their love of country and sheer bloody-mindedness and their refusal to capitulate to anyone.

For all of Bond's Cold War era nationalism, Q thinks his recent deployment to Moscow must feel like a homecoming.

Q can't say it's lonely now that Bond is back on assignment, because then he would have to admit he misses him, and attachment is unprofessional. He will admit it's less exciting.

His daily routines like reading the paper and picking up the milk and returning overdue library books are mundane again now that England isn't accommodating a grounded international agent with a penchant for explosives and poking his nose where it doesn't belong. Q used to imagine that 007 was lurking in every unsuspecting corner of Sainsbury's, ready to leap out and embroil Q in an international incident, and Q would be forced to drop his shopping and come along—reluctantly, of course—because someone has to keep an eye on Bond, and Q is nothing but responsible and long-suffering.

Maybe Bond is right, and Q is terribly young.

Which is not the same as terribly stupid, so he doesn't break stride when a long black Jaguar XJL sidles next to him one morning as he's emerging with hot breakfast from his favourite shop.

The driver's side window rolls down. "Get in the car," the woman says. Her accent is peculiar. Not quite British. African subcontinent, certainly, but Q doesn’t have a talent for accents to pinpoint her to somewhere useful.

He keeps his eyes ahead. "Identification, please,"

She tsks. "You expect me to flash my ID in the broad daylight?"

"Do you really expect me to trust you without?"

"Oh for godsakes," she snaps. "It's a company car."

Q skims over it. "Not quite, though you've done a good job," he says. It occurs to him that he should take off running at this point, but they must have some leverage if they think he'll drive off with them to certain death.

"Allow me to rephrase," the woman says. The back window rolls down, and Q sees a minor Q-branch technician bracketed by two dark-suited men that look like they're chiselled from stone. The leverage, then.

The technician is pale and scared. He can't be more than nineteen. Q thinks about giving him a reassuring look, but there is nothing comforting about the situation. He settles for a glare that's meant to convey a stern reprimand to the boy for allowing himself to be taken hostage. The technician drops his eyes.

"If you don't cooperate, we'll—"

"Yes yes yes," Q says and finally stops walking. It is no coincidence that they chose to snatch him from the tiniest emptiest street in all of London. They must have tracked his movements and don't mean to have witnesses. That doesn't bode well for the technician, who is clambering out of the car with all the grace of a newborn foal.

"You are not shooting that boy," Q snaps. The tech looks like he's about to vomit.

The woman looks surprised. "No, of course not."

"What—"

He's manhandled into the backseat, and the car roars away. They take his phone and his shopping and throw it all into the passenger seat. He puts up some token protest that his breakfast will crumble and go cold, but it's just a remnant of the old M's policy for impertinence in the face of danger. Q hopes his captors can't see how his hands are shaking.

"Thought you were locking me in the boot. Isn't that how it's done?" he quips with false bravado.

"We've already given your subordinate a list of demands to give your employer," the woman calls over her shoulder. "We'll be gone by the time they're notified."

Ah. He's being ransomed. It's a little flattering being ransomed, like he's someone important. Q knows he's a poor bargaining chip, but he keeps his mouth shut because weak leverage means dead weight, and these people look the sort to start shooting when they’re disappointed.

In the sphere of super villain monologing, his captors don't disappoint. They're an obscure Sudanese arms dealing group that Q pretends to know, and MI6 has apparently taken a few of their colleagues into custody for being the accessories in some larger criminal racket. Not pre-meditated in the slightest, but the woman seems to think it was a direct assault on their organization. She thinks MI6 considers her a major threat. She should be so lucky, Q thinks.

She's crazy, the woman. Ange, a false name obviously. She's actually barking mad, something she's hidden very well behind her string of pearls and vibrant green sheath dress. Q might have missed it entirely if not for the tremble of her finger on the gun trigger and her eyes, which suggest that she might consider shooting Q anyway to spite M. Q is not an advocate of this plan, especially now that the city has fallen away and the softly rolling hills in the suburbs are as quiet as the grave.

Q closes his eyes. It's a poor choice of words.

The decision is made for him when one of the men jostles his glasses, and the embedded tracker gives itself away with a little damning whine and a spark.

"What was that?" Ange shouts. She wrenches the car to a stop and spins around to wave the gun in Q's face. And it's perfect, actually.

"Need a new pair of specs. I have terrible vision," Q says. "It's also a little known fact that I can hold my breath for an entire minute."

He smashes his wristwatch against the plastic console between the two front seats—they didn't even bind his hands, thought he'd been cowed—and fills the car with Q-branch's prized knockout gas. It takes his captors less than five seconds to succumb. Q is careful not to breathe in, but the gas prickles his nostrils as he shoves one of the men out of the way and climbs over him to the door.

He closes the door behind him and breathes in the blessed fresh air. His stomach takes a moment to protest loudly, but the knockout gas has inundated the pasty by now, and he doesn't want to chance it. Kidnapping, arms dealers, a ruined breakfast. A brilliant start to the week.

He circles around to retrieve his other things from the passenger seat. The residual knockout gas makes him go a little woozy as he opens the door. He doesn't actually have many important things on his mobile, but he's attached to it and doesn't relish transferring all five contacts in his address book to a new phone. He pockets it and checks if the locks on his briefcase have been broken.

He's famished and shaking from nerves, so the safety clicking off a gun doesn’t register till he looks up and sees it point blank between his eyes. Ange is barely conscious, but her lips are pulled back in a snarl, and her eyes are wild.

"Bastard," she snarls.

"You really should have locked me in the boot," Q says and cracks her in the face with his briefcase before slamming the passenger door shut again. Her blood-red fingernails skate down the glass and then go still.

He gets ten paces from the car before he realises he's shaking, and then he sinks to the packed earth and takes a few deep breaths. The gas won't last forever. Twenty minutes at the most. He needs to take care of Ange and her cohorts before they come round.

He takes another breath.

He has his briefcase, his phone. He's alive. It's enough.

Walking back to the car is the most difficult thing he's ever done, more difficult than his doctoral defence, worse than the rainy day he was approached for a job with the British secret service that would drop him off the face of the earth.

He has nothing for binding, so he tears off strips of his shirt and ties their ankles and wrists with the knots he was taught in mandatory basic training. In truth, he's a bit pleased with himself. He can just see Bond's face when he hears about this.

He airs out the car and inspects every inch of it, but it's a rental, and he finds nothing except a pack of cigarettes, the receipt from the rental company, and a glossy brochure welcoming the reader to London.

He calls MI6, and M himself picks up on the first ring.

"The devil happened to you?" he demands. "Kidnapping, Q?"

"It was really more of an exchange," Q says.

"Yes, we have the technician in interrogation."

Q winces. MI6 interrogation is never pleasant, even when you're one of their own. "I've…incapacitated them."

"I daresay you have," M says with exaggerated patience. "And when shall we expect you back in the office?"

"Er." Q wheels around and sees nothing but a distant cluster of chocolate-box cottages. He checks the GPS on his phone. "I'm near Petham Downs, sir. I have their car here, but…I can't drive."

It was a point of pride when he mentioned it to Bond, but now he feels useless and incompetent. M is very good at that.

M gives him a moment to squirm. "They'll be someone to fetch you shortly," he says finally and hangs up.

Q doesn't feel so pleased with himself anymore. The feeling intensifies when another black car—legitimate company plates this time—arrives a few minutes later, and M's secretary Moneypenny hops out. Moneypenny is the most ruthlessly competent person he's ever met, Bond not excepting. And here he is with dishevelled hair and a torn up shirt, looking like he spent most of the trip lashed to the top of the Jaguar.

Moneypenny inspects his handiwork with the knots, pensively toes Ange in the ribs, and tells him a team will be on-site shortly to retrieve the car and his three assailants. It's all very cool and professional, and he can't help but wonder when the other shoe will drop.

He knows all about Moneypenny because data mining is his business, and she is the infamous double-o who shot Bond off a train and nearly killed him. Out of all the field agents he's met, she strikes him as the most socialised, the one that was let out of her paddock more than her fellows or came into the game late with most of her head screwed on properly. The other agents can be as smooth and charming as high socialites, but each word is surgically precise, and there is nothing behind their eyes. It chills him. At least Bond's eyes look like they belong in a living face, angry and exhausted and so very blue.

The other shoe finally drops after they've crossed into London.

"Tell me," Moneypenny says, her voice cutting through the silence. "Please tell me they clubbed you over the head. Or chloroformed you. Tell me you didn't just climb into the car with them."

"It was an exchange," Q repeats. He suspects the excuse is wearing thin.

She strikes the wheel with the palm of her hand. "Damn it, Q. We could afford to lose Charlie. We can't lose you."

He frowns. "I didn't think—"

"No," she says. "I suppose you didn't think. In fact, I'm sure of it. I never thought 007's quartermaster would be such an idiot. The two of you quite deserve one another."

"I got the information."

She purses her lips. "Yes. You did. It wasn’t bad work." And then, before he can be flattered, she adds, "Now, you will stop entertaining these notions that you are a field agent and do your own damn job, do you understand? You could have been killed. You're too valuable to the organisation."

"But I'm," he starts. She glares at him but doesn't interrupt. "I never thought to run."

Moneypenny's anger transforms into something else. Something softer and heavier before her scowl is back, and she snaps her fingers in his face. "Oy. I'm only saying this once. The next time something like this happens, you can _help_ by protecting yourself and letting us do the espionage. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," he murmurs and looks down at his clasped hands. They itch with needing something to _do_. He's never been able to sit still for very long. Perhaps it's one of the reasons he hates to fly.

There's something bothering him, and it's out of his mouth before he can stop it. "Who's Charlie?"

Moneypenny's eyebrows come together. "Charlie? The technician that works in your lab?"

He shakes his head.

She looks incredulous. "Are you saying you don't know the name of the man that comes into your department every single day?"

"No," he says. There are other more important things on his mind, quite honestly. "Why should I?"

"You're a bastard," she says in wonder. "You've got everyone believing the sweet naïve boffin racket and all. And you're a complete _bastard._ "

It should sting, but she grins at him with something like approval, and he finds himself smiling back.


	2. Qvale Mangusta

M gives him the worst dressing down of his life and then dismisses him with the threat of suspension at a repeat offence. Q doesn't mention that Ange almost shot him in the face, and M doesn't explain away the burly technician that has suddenly replaced Charlie in Q's lab. Q doesn't want to ask if he's a bodyguard because he would feel silly if he were wrong, and M would feign ignorance either way.

Moneypenny coolly ignores him on his way out of M's office but later brings him lunch in his lab. Two egg sandwiches and blisteringly hot cups of tea with milk skin clinging to the lip. Her eyes dare him to complain.

"Didn't see you at the commissary," she says and appropriates a seat for herself at his workbench among the bits of plastic sheathing and copper wire.

Q is soldering a handful of eye-searingly tiny resistors onto a circuit board. He spares her a look over the tops of his new glasses. "I usually eat here."

"Oh," she says. "Then I suppose I'll just give this to someone else, shall I?"

"I didn't say that," Q replies quickly and puts aside his work.

They eat in companionable silence. Moneypenny doesn't make small talk, and Q is grateful. It is a myth that engineers are solitary creatures because it takes an entire village to raise a supersonic jet, and all their projects require an amalgam of disciplines that necessitates teamwork. But Q doesn't know how to talk to normal people, people who aren't fluent in the universal language of mathematics, who aren't rendered speechless by the beauty of chemical structures. He's willing to bet not a one of them plays Quake.

Moneypenny isn't the chatty sort and chews her food slowly as if it is her last meal for the week. He supposes it's an old habit after deployments into remote and sometimes hostile environments, and though he can't quite imagine her foraging for food and rubbing sticks together to make a fire, he also knows not all of MI6's assignments are so glamorous. Only so many terrorists can threaten a third world war in Amalfi and Maldives. 

Q is nibbling on his last sandwich crusts when Moneypenny puts down her paper cup of tea and says, "I won't tell Bond."

He's thrown for a moment and then laughs. "Oh. You mean about the kidnapping? Why should he care?"

Moneypenny purses her lips in the way she does when she disagrees but thinks he's too thick to bring round. He has become intimately familiar with that expression from their drive back to London after the kidnapping business. She doesn't bring up the subject again.

Moneypenny makes a habit of stopping by at least once a week to have lunch together. It makes no sense, because she's charming and beautiful and certainly has no need to tolerate Q's messy desk and awkward silences and rumpled jackets. Half the time he's not even sure she likes him very much.

If Bond has heard about Q's misadventure, he gives no indication. He still saunters into Q-branch with an irritating quip about the quality of Q's gadgets and leaves with a flagrant disregard for his instructions. Q arms himself for these encounters with all the ways he knows best: his ugliest jumper, his second-best tie, and a pithy retort at the end of his tongue to be kept at the ready whenever the chime from Bond's personal PIN echoes through Q's security system.

Bond has a way of disorienting him, spinning him about and knocking him off his feet like a rip current. Q had brought up _The Fighting Temeraire_ at the museum to catch Bond flat-footed with a bewildering foray into high culture or perhaps an equaliser if Bond proved himself an amateur art critic. Instead, Bond had sliced through Q's machinations like Alexander and the Gordian knot, turning all of Q's worldly prattle and dour put-upon expressions into the oversized clothes of a child playing dress up with his father's things. Q dislikes and envies him by turns.

(While the moral of the Gordian knot is supposed to be the elegance of the simple solution, Q thinks it is a litmus test for an era that values brawn and the naked sword over the power of intellect. England's present anti-terrorism zeitgeist certainly agrees with 007.)

 

Bond leaves in his earpiece on a mission while he's interrogating a suspect mid-coitus. Q wonders if he's supposed to be shocked, but all he can muster up is a tepid, "Oh, _really_ , 007," before muting the comm. He wonders why so many people think he ought to be squeamish about sex.

"God, that is just like Bond," Moneypenny says when she hears. She shows up for lunch almost every day now. Maybe she thinks of his lab as neutral territory between the double-o branch and the bureaucrats, and she hasn't decided who she wants to be yet. Q makes no demands either way.

"Isn't it," he says. "I wonder if he didn't do it on purpose."

"You should hear about what he did in Tunisia," she says, and suddenly they're chatting away like old friends. Q is a little resentful that Bond expands to fill the spaces where he isn't wanted even when he is absent, but on the whole Q is just relieved he and Moneypenny finally have something to talk about.

She's alright, Moneypenny. She's terrifying and efficient and doesn't use two words when one will do, and she still startles and goes for a gun at her hip that isn't there whenever someone walks into her office unannounced. Q pretends not to notice but sets up a video feed at her desk that's connected to all the hallway cameras leading to M's office. He thinks that endears him to her somewhat.

Bond still hangs around her after his debriefings with M to flirt and say vaguely condescending things about her desk job, but she knows that Bond ‘s comment about her unsuitability in the field is actually somewhat of a compliment, and they both know he's always been bit of a bastard and she can break his arm if she really wants.

Q wonders what Bond thinks of him. If Bond thinks of him at all.

 

Q is packing up his briefcase to leave for the day when Bond strolls in with a set of keys twirling around his index finger. He's changed out of his crumpled bloodied suit and into a crisp white shirt with a high collar that hides the bandage at his neck where he was almost stabbed in the throat. Q will never understand how he attracts more trouble than all the other double-os combined.

"Leaving for the day, Q?" Bond asks, all innocence, and Q is instantly suspicious.

"Yes? I do occasionally go home on the regular commute despite what some people may believe about my work ethic."

"Well then. I suppose you wouldn’t mind coming along for a drive."

"I beg your pardon?"

Bond tosses him the keys, and by some miracle, Q catches them. "The car's in the company garage."

"I do have errands to run, 007." He doesn't, but he'll be damned if he hops to every time Bond smoulders at him with his tinderflint eyes. For one, Q thinks he's technically Bond's superior if he compares their degrees of separation away from M, and additionally, Q is not some nubile sexually flexible woman that can be swayed by said smoulder.

"In your own time, then." Bond actually _winks_ at him and then sails back out.

"You really aren't half as charming as you suppose yourself," Q calls after him, but his voice doesn't breach the hermetically sealed doors. He’s already talked himself into the lie, so he settles back at his desk and wonders for the umpteenth time why he can't just tell Bond to piss off.

He pokes at his keyboard for the next ten minutes and refactors a piece of software he's sending to Q Oversight for approval, even though cleanup and documentation are not his job. It's dull work, but he thinks of Bond waiting impatiently in the garage for him and checks out another file from the source control with a vindictive click of his mouse.

Q enters the garage twenty minutes later and finds Bond waiting for him on the bonnet of a gleaming vermillion Qvale Mangusta. It’s a very fine tableau, Bond in his tailored suit lounging on top of a beautiful car, one that Q suspects he’s meant to appreciate, so instead he circles the car and pretends to inspect it as he waits for Bond's next move. He can feel Bond following him with his eyes.

Bond is twiddling with the balisong laser cutter that Q made for his last mission. Q is surprised he's kept it and then irritated that he hasn’t bothered checking it in. The only piece of equipment Bond has ever returned in one piece is the silver thumb-sized radio, and that was only because he decided to make the distress call instead of doing something idiotic and in-character like blowing up Silva's entire island.

"De Qvale Mangusta, isn't it?" Q stops at the passenger window to peer inside. Bond has removed the targa top, and the black interior is lustrous under the garage's soft overhead lights. "Well, I suppose you could do worse for anonymity."  
  
Bond tosses the knife in the air and catches it. "Never marked you as a car enthusiast." His eyes are carefully blank. "What with your aversion to driving."

"Ignorance does not excuse," Q says. "I am required to build anything MI6 asks of me, after all."

"After all," Bond agrees.

"And besides." Q runs the pads of his fingers over one clear bulbous headlamp, inches away from the pressed line of Bond's pinstripe trousers. "I can appreciate beautiful things."

"Quite." Bond's eyes are half-lidded and pensive, and Q chafes under their weight.

He retreats to a safer location near the wheels where the car is paned with dark angled grilles. "Why am I here?"

Bond holds out a hand. Q wonders if he's supposed to take it and looks from Bond's wide scarred hand to his expectant expression.

"The keys, Q."

"Ah." Q digs them out of his jacket and hands them over sheepishly. "Where are we going?"

Bond raises a single eyebrow and pockets the keys. "So you are coming with me after all."

"Don't play silly buggers with me, 007."

The balisong snaps shut. "Get in the car, Q."

Q tilts up his chin. "Not until you tell me where you’re taking me."

Bond stands up. Q has never thought of Bond as being particularly intimidating, but in that moment he is taller than a titan, large and dark and encompassing. Q’s heart actually stutters for a treacherous moment. "I'll tell you on the way. Get in the car."

Bond raises the square key fob, and Q thinks absurdly that it is another product of Q-branch's diligent campaign to weaponise mundane objects. Q thought he'd put a stop to that sort of thing when he'd taken over research and development.

Bond pushes a button.

Q jumps as the car unlocks with a high bright beep, and the incongruity cuts through the tension like the laser cutter hidden inside Bond's balisong. Q straightens the lapels of his jacket, warns Bond about wasting his time, and climbs into the passenger side, throwing his briefcase into the tiny shelf of a backseat.

Bond eels into the driver's seat with oily grace as if he hadn't been contemplating abduction with the liberal application of blunt force. Q realises half a second after Bond has shut the door that he should have taken off running instead of acquiescing to Bond's demands and sealing himself into a tiny airless space with a professional killer.

Fool me once, Q laments, but if the old M taught him nothing else by example, it was that vulnerability is something that happens to other people. Q raises his chin, folds his hands in his lap, and wears his frostiest expression as if he is appalled at Bond's presumption to frighten him. Which he is, really.

He watches Bond start the car.

"I should let you know that MI6 is not in the habit of ceding to terrorists," Q tells him with chilly poise. "But it is after hours, and this is at least a halfway decent kidnapping."

Bond's answering hum of amusement resonates and mingles with the sound of the revving engine. Q can taste the low-tone exhaust rumble on his lips like dark dense rum cake. He opens his mouth as if to inhale it.

Bond is staring at him curiously, letting the car idle. Q lets out a long sustained breath. "Well. Alright then."

It is all the permission Bond needs to floor the accelerator. Q is thrown back into the passenger seat, and the silky leather crushes around him like an embrace. Bond sends the car screaming around a long sombre line of company Jaguars and then bursts into the stark open brightness of a side street that turns into a busy intersection.

Bond rolls down the window, and the wind blows Q's hair into a bird's nest. The evening is humid and smells of cigarettes and overflowing bins. Bond turns west and drives. He doesn’t try to make small talk, although part way he turns on the radio and clucks over the news like he hasn't been responsible for half of it. An Iranian nuclear lab bombing. The mysterious reappearance of a Russian diplomat in New Delhi.

It is oddly intimate being in a car together when Bond isn’t harrying an enemy or making a grand escape. Q is too used to proximity vis-a-vis an earpiece. He clenches and unclenches his fists into the fabric of his wrinkled trousers. "Bond," he says softly. "Where are you taking me?"

Bond doesn't look away from the road. "Somewhere very beneficial for your well-being, I assure you."

"That’s what you people said the last time."

"The last time?" Bond repeats, as if he hadn't charmed Q's file out of one of the admins within minutes of being assigned to Q’s roster. Q hopes Bond had a devil of a time sorting through all the redacted material.

Bond doesn’t know a damn thing, and he’s fishing for information. Q folds his arms and settles more comfortably into the seat. "Tut tut, 007. You should keep better tabs on your quartermaster."

Bond turns down his mouth in a grimace that would look forbidding if Q didn’t know he was suppressing a smile. It is absurdly easy to make Bond smile but impossible to make him laugh. Q has never heard Bond’s laugh.

Bond finally stops the car at a bend in the road among the rolling grassy hills. He gets out, and Q follows suit. There is nothing here for miles except a cluster of chocolate-box cottages drowsing together in the distance. If Q squints, he can imagine the indents of disturbed earth beside the road where his kidnappers were laid out like tinned sardines.

“This is where they took me. We’re in Petham Downs.” He wheels around. “You knew I was kidnapped?”

“I would be a sorry spy if I didn’t keep tabs on my own quartermaster,” Bond says wryly. “Have they put you through the psych evals yet?”

Q makes a disgusted sound in answer. He has, with that old bat Maxwell that MI6 has got on retainer. “The old M would never have put me through that rubbish,” he mutters and then winces. Bond is the last person he should speak to about the old M.

“The old M could do no wrong,” Bond murmurs, his consonants harsh with some hidden emotion that Q is reluctant to name. Bond raises his eyes to Q’s face. He looks old and tired. “Get in the car, Q.”

Q frowns and turns back, but Bond is already manhandling him into the driver’s seat, and Q has no choice but to comply. Bond closes the door and then circles around to take up Q’s recently vacated space. Q’s discarded jacket is crushed down into the seat under Bond’s spine, and Q suppresses a frown as Bond makes no move to extract it.

 “This is unprofessional, 007,” he says instead.

“No more unprofessional than anything else,” Bond replies smoothly. “I don’t want you to be a liability to me, Q.”

“I’m not a liability,” Q snaps but doesn’t pursue the line of thought. He is a liability. He knows too many of MI6’s secrets, and he isn’t sure whether they would mount a rescue or terminate him in a controlled hit if anyone took him again. He knows which one the old M would have chosen.

“There’s no need for you to take time out of your busy schedule to teach me,” Q amends. “I’ve read up on cars. I’ve watched people drive. It’s all technical.”

“Some,” Bond agrees. He leans over to grip the steering wheel, not to direct the car or push Q‘s hands away, merely to hold it. Q can smell his cologne. “Part of it is instinct.”

“I’ve never had much use for instinct,” Q says.

“No?”

But Bond is a creature of finely-honed instinct. He has no time to calculate trajectories and vectors when jumping from roof to roof or targeting an assassin’s heart from 500 meters away.

To Bond, Q must seem like a stunted animal, deafened and blinded within his mechanical trappings. Bond is bewildering and illogical and unpredictable. It’s what makes him a first-class agent and a terror to work with. Q’s master’s thesis was on the effects of chaotic data on the performance of high-complexity algorithms. As Bond’s quartermaster, he will have to do.

Q will not admit that the car is more difficult to drive than he’d expected, because he is not in the business of giving Bond satisfaction. Bond rolls down the windows so Q can hear the engine and practice shifting gears. He nearly has a heart attack the first time he stalls the car and then every time after that, even though he should be accustomed to the sound.

 “You couldn’t have signed out an automatic?” Q demands.

Bond looks scandalised. "The only cars worth driving are manual."

“Cars are not supposed to be enjoyable, 007.”

“You haven’t been in the right cars.” Bond’s eyes are hooded. “Or perhaps with the right people.”

Q does not dignify that answer with a response.

The road in front of them is flat, and Q finally manages to disengage the clutch properly and move them along at a respectable five miles an hour. Bond tells him to shift into second gear when the engine speeds up.

“I should shift at approximately twenty-eight thousand RPM, yes?” Q tears his eyes away from the road to the tachometer for a brief terrified moment and prays Bond doesn’t notice his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. “Why don’t they label all those hash marks?”

“Listen to the engine,” Bond repeats. “It depends on the car.”

“I can’t do that. You can do that. I need numbers.”

“Shift,” Bond instructs. “Shift now. Q.”

“Ugh, I wasn’t hired for this,” Q grumbles but obeys. They shoot up to twenty-five miles an hour. Intellectually, Q knows that’s incredibly slow, but it feels like a rocket when he’s behind the wheel.

Bond relaxes into his seat and lets his legs fall open in a languorous sprawl. “When were you hired, Q?” he asks.  “Did they pull you out of a suitably impressive public school, or were you caught breaking into their servers?”

“What an extraordinary question,” Q drawls. He wishes Bond would stop talking. Driving is consuming his concentration, and he wonders if Bond is leveraging that to interrogate him.

Bond lifts an elegant shoulder. Q can’t see his expression. “It takes someone either very naive or very reckless to plug a hostile laptop directly into an MI6 terminal.”

“I could have known exactly what I was doing,” Q suggests.

“Is that so?” Bond rumbles, and Q quashes down an involuntary twitch.

Q can acknowledge to himself that he is at least a little attracted to Bond (inasmuch as everyone who meets Bond is attracted to him) because self-awareness is the first step to prevention, and inoculation requires exposure. “MI6 is not stupid or wanting in paranoia. They must have considered the option.”

“That you were working for Silva? The thought never crossed my mind.” Bond must see Q’s incredulous expression. “You’re my quartermaster. I trusted M not to assign me someone who was insidious. Or naive or reckless.”

Which is not the same thing as trusting Q. Bond’s eyes are burning a hole into the side of Q’s face. Q doesn’t turn to look and is grateful the distraction of driving prevents him from meeting Bond’s eyes. Bond’s hand settles just under the parking brake under Q’s elbow.

“Are you very naive or reckless, Q?” Bond asks in a dangerously innocent voice.

A spatter of rain across the windshield startles Q and excuses him from answering. The car veers sharply before he corrects it.

“Shift down,” Bond instructs. “Shift, no. _Down_. Mind the clutch. Good, now apply the brakes.”

Q does as he’s told and hopes Bond can’t see the colour rising into his face. He’s never felt so incompetent in his life, and in front of _Bond_ , no less.

The first freckles of rain are dotting the pristine windshield, and Bond has him pull over so he can fetch the central panel of the roof from the boot and snap it back into place. It's an effortless transition into an enclosed hardtop. Q admits reluctantly that the Mangusta is a marvel of modern engineering despite its sheer superfluous extravagance.

Bond takes over driving as the rain worsens and turns the car back to London, sending the car roaring up and down the hills at terrifying speed. Q screws his fingers into his wrinkled ruined jacket and reminds himself that Bond has done this countless times before in more dire conditions.

He looks over in time to catch a tiny smile flicker across Bond’s face, and suddenly Q knows exactly what this is. This is preventative action. M can disapprove of Q all he likes and Moneypenny can threaten enough bodily harm to incapacitate fifty of him, but Bond knows just where to strike a nerve—at Q’s pride. This entire evening has been an exercise in putting a quartermaster with delusions of espial grandeur in his place.

Bond tries to make conversation again, but this time Q is too furious to bother making an effort. They drive in silence back to the MI6 garage, and Q climbs out with all the dignity he can muster. He’s more disappointed than angry—he never expected Bond of all people to play politics.

“Well, this has been very educational and humiliating,” Q says crisply. “Let’s never speak of this again.”

“I make no promises,” Bond says and drives off.


	3. Lamborghini

After the mortifying car incident, Q’s field kits are impeccable. His radios can detect enemy radio frequencies through their speech patterns and dynamically force pair with them. His guns know when Bond has been hurt and adjust for the injury. He never wants Bond to doubt his competency ever again.

“This is good. I mean, really good.” Moneypenny examines the gun as Q unwraps their curried chicken sandwiches. Her eyes are slow and her fingers are too quick when she turns it over in her hands, and he suspects she is thinking of stealing it for herself.

“It’s calibrated to Bond specifically,” he says in what he hopes is a quelling tone. “Had him down here for a whole afternoon taking readings on his stance. I thought he would shoot _me_ with the gun by the end of it.”

 “A little antagonism is good for the spirit,” Moneypenny says cheerily. Only Moneypenny would equate threats and intimidation with healthy competition. Q suspects she was a bully as a child. He doesn’t bring up the inelegant intimidation with the Mangusta. “I’m sure Bond will be very pleased with the gun.”

“I’m not trying to impress him,” Q grumbles.

Moneypenny’s forehead wrinkles. “Well, he’s certainly trying to impress you.”

 

Bond is back from Austria with new circles under his eyes and a shallow cut across the bridge of his nose that makes him look disgustingly rakish. Q imagines they must be a sight standing next to each other in M’s office: the thug in the beautiful English business suit and the public school boy in a dingy eggplant-coloured jumper. Bond is in no fighting shape to take on another mission so soon. If they were all being honest with each other, 007 hasn’t been in good fighting shape for some time.

So it’s a surprise when M says, “You aren’t needed for this mission, 007,” and then turns to Q. “How soon can you have a team ready?”

Q executes a few quick in-place protocols on his tablet. “They’re ready now.”

M looks pleased and hands him the brief. “This is a retrieval job. The sooner we have the information, the better.”

So it’s a hacking job. Fine-tuned artistry. Q goes through the file as he navigates his way out of M’s office. He's pleased to be given something tailored to him, a task that puts him to good use.

He’s halfway to Q-branch before he realises Bond is trailing after him.

“Don’t you have better things to do, 007?” Q asks with lukewarm irritation.

“Not particularly,” Bond replies. His hands are in hidden casually in his pockets, but Q knows two fingers on his left hand are sprained from dangling on the bottom of an aerial tram while being shot at. (Q doesn’t even bother asking.) Q realises this strategy is M’s idea of giving 007 ample time to recover without bruising Bond’s ego or inciting his rebellion. It seems this new M is more careful with his toys than his predecessor. Q isn’t sure whether he resents being used as a distraction, but he admits that being singled out is flattering.

He pulls a few photographs from the file. North Korea is an ongoing concern with the British government, but the grainy images of a long-range missile scheduled to launch a supposed weather satellite has apparently escalated the issue to urgent status.

The launch of this missile is not a publicised event. The testing site is a tiny quiet facility in the wilds of the Rangrim mountains. The kind of mind that builds secret missiles systems in the middle of the mountains anticipates outside attacks but never suspects the entire system could be acquired untouched and manipulated like a puppet. They never think to sever the umbilical cord to its mother base in Pyonyang.

Q doesn’t bother trying to steal information because the inbuilt degradation means the data will probably self-terminate by the time he’s done. This isn’t the time for soft slumbering attacks that will take weeks to take effect and even longer to detect. This is a slash and burn. This facility is off-the-books, and the Koreans won’t have the guts to raise an outcry because that will usher too many further investigations that they would rather avoid.

So Q assembles his team and destroys them. They seize security checks and propagate errors through the source like a shock through a nervous system till the firewall is numb and insensate and blind to anything that forces its way through. Q creates backdoors and decoy backdoors till the system is riddled through like Swiss cheese, each attack a misdirection from the next.

Finally, he plants a highly volatile virus just for the hell of it because if M is using him as a distraction for Bond’s recovery, then Q does nothing by halves. It’s a vicious fast-acting virus. Far too deadly and quick to preserve even itself, like an Ebola strain or the plague. It kills too quickly to linger. Any trace of MI6’s involvement is muffled like so much background radiation amid the chaos.

Q’s voice has grown hoarse from speaking, and the mug beside him has a thin line of unfinished coffee that he doesn’t remember drinking. He turns around and sees Bond watching him. Bond should have left hours ago, but there he is slouched against the wall still wearing the same suit and looking as fresh as the day he left for Vienna.

Q must look a wreck, but adrenaline is still lapping at his bones and buoying him up. He gives Bond a fierce grin, joyless and all teeth. Bond replies with a tiny devilish smirk, but his eyes are thoughtful. _Curious._

It seems that James Bond has finally begun paying attention. Q knows what happens to people Bond takes an interest in. Moneypenny is the only one that has survived, because she is too scornful to be seduced and too competent for Bond to get her killed.

Q quickly realises that once he has Bond’s full attention, he doesn’t want it. Bond lingers around Q-branch after unnecessary debriefings over absent guns and radios and monopolises Q’s tea breaks with irritating questions and a flagrant disregard for the sanctity of the unfinished projects on Q’s workbench.

“You should really consider a different wardrobe if you want to be taken seriously,” Bond critiques and plucks at the sleeve of Q’s caramel and navy cardigan as he watches Q insulate an exposed wire that has left a welt across Bond’s thumb.

“People who take me seriously don’t give themselves electrical burns,” Q replies. He could jerk his arm away like tearing off a plaster, but he wants to know what Bond is playing at. He crooks his wrist and tries to twist away.

Bond pulls back, and they tussle back and forth for a moment. Q smothers the tiny smile threatening to curl his mouth. It’s a judgement of Solomon, a ploy to see if destroying a prize is worth the possession.  Q doesn’t want to destroy his cardigan, and he has no interest engaging in power plays with Bond. Bond still hasn’t apologised for bullying him with the Mangusta.

“That’s enough, 007,” he says and swats at Bond’s fingers with his other hand. Bond evades him—Bond avoids being touched frequently for a man who revels in his own brutish physicality—and leaves the lab looking incredibly smug.

Q grumbles about it later that afternoon to Moneypenny, who has decided to sit at an empty workstation to supervise his inventory process and perhaps topple a few small governments on her Blackberry.

 “Bond is an incurable flirt,” Moneypenny says, looking bored. “He never means it.”

Q does know, but that doesn’t soften the sting of hearing it aloud. “Obviously.”

She regards him with amusement. “It’s because he likes you. You’re interesting.”

“Does he flirt with you?” Q asks suspiciously. “No, what am I talking about? Of course he does. You’re more fascinating than the entire agency put together. I don’t see why he bothers with me whether he means it or not.”

Moneypenny lets herself look pleased for a moment and then her expression turns shrewd. She cocks her head. “Do you want him to mean it?”

Q drops several extremely expensive Q-branch watches in quick succession. “No, what would be the point of that?” Of course he’s thought about it. Everyone Bond has ever flirted with has thought about it, but Bond is a disaster, and they would be a disaster together for however brief a time till Bond grew bored of him. “There’s nothing interesting about me.”

She gives him a withering look. “The man with the redacted file and a letter for a name says there’s nothing interesting about him. If I didn’t know you, I would say you were playing stupid.” She picks up one of the watches. “What does this do, then? Poison darts?”

“No. It tells the time,” Q replies severely, and she laughs.

 

Q forgets that 007 is a consummate chameleon till he changes his stripes. 

Bond is out on an assignment to a tiny anonymous island off the coast of the Philippines that has been occupied by a corporate oil baron that has been stockpiling weaponry for presumably nefarious purposes. It’s a routine mission, as much as they have routine missions, and M is off the comm to take care of business in Italy. Q feels very alone.

Bond is wearing one of Q’s latest devices—a vidlink on a filament as small as a human hair that gives Q visuals on Bond in any direction. Bond has a vidlink fixed to the hairs at the nape of his neck and another at the hairline of his right temple. Q is feeling a bit seasick watching him run and jump on multiple screens through the gossamer eyestalk cameras.

Bond infiltrates the compound dressed as one of the hired help and speaks Tagalog with a pronounced Dutch accent, which endears him to the other mercenaries. Knocking them out with a brick and shutting them in the boiler room is somewhat less endearing, as is setting a controlled blast inside their headquarters and embroiling himself in a shootout with the oil baron on the rooftop.

“That’s everyone in the compound,” Q says and tries not to grimace at the scattering of limp bleeding bodies. “Leave a few for the police, 007.”

“Coast guard?” Bond asks as he pokes through the records on the oil baron’s computer.

“Yes, on their way,” Q says. “Please stop touching that. I’ll need it intact.”

Bond ignores him and keeps looking. He pauses, makes a curious noise, and opens a file. A personnel record.

Q rolls his eyes. “I’m sure you’ve shot everyone, Bond. Your flight out of Puerto Princesa leaves today.”

“They’re not here,” Bond interrupts.

“Who?”

Bond doesn’t answer and runs out of the office. Q does have to shut his eyes then as Bond jumps over a mercenary’s bound and feebly moving body and onto the roof of a Jeep, a balcony, then down through the skylight of the baron’s lavish personal villa at the edge of the compound.

Q squints through the dim shadows in the hallway where all the window blinds are drawn. “Where are you?”

“Nursery. It’s empty.”

Q puts down his tea. “The _nursery_? The baron brought his children? Our intelligence doesn’t say—“

“The baron was paranoid. He must have smuggled them in.”

Q taps a few keys relaying a message to the coast guard radios. “They must have fled during the raid. I’ve alerted the police and told them to conduct a wide perimeter search.”

Bond stoops over to collect a delicate china doll with a muslin dress that is sprawled in an awkward rigor mortis on the plush carpeting. Its open-and-shut eyes dissect Q through the vidlink.

“They wouldn’t have abandoned their possessions,” Bond says and places the doll with uncharacteristic reverence on one of the two child-sized beds.

“From a practical point of view—“

“They aren’t adults, Q. They’re children. They wouldn’t have left their things.”

From the window, Q sees a single car parked in front of the garage. The baron owns two cars—twin Lamborghinis—his pride and joy and only second to his children. Bond even joked early on about the extravagant waste of shipping two cars to a small island with poor roads and nowhere to go.

The same chilling idea strikes them both at once.

“Bond,” Q starts, but Bond is already sprinting towards the garage’s forbidding doors. The baron and his mercenaries have been in custody for some time, and the children wouldn’t know how to access the garage keycode.

“It’s locked. Bond, please,” Q pleads. “I’m sure they escaped during the raid.”

Bond shoots out the keypad and pried his fingers underneath the garage door. With Herculean effort, he hauls it up. The second Lamborghini is in the garage. Its faint velvety rumble echoes through Bond’s earpiece and into Q’s own.

“Get out of that garage immediately,” Q orders. “It’s poisonous. You won’t come back out.”

“Then I don’t come back out,” Bond replies flatly.

Q makes a strangled sound, but Bond ducks down and lets the garage door fall behind him. A noxious miasma envelops him the moment he steps inside, and he chokes and stumbles. Q can see a tube like a telephone wire snaking from the tailpipe of the Lamborghini to the barely cracked window in the driver’s seat. Bond smashes the glass with his elbow and reaches inside to unlock the door.

“Bond.” Q is swaying on his feet. He can’t remember standing up. “Bond, where are the children?”

“Q, no.” The vidlink goes dark. Bond has torn it out.

“007!” Q shouts. “Put that back at once! Do you hear me? 007!”

Bond hasn’t removed his earpiece, and Q hears him draw a single rattling hollow breath like it’s physically paining him to be alive while others are dead. Q can imagine Bond cradling two tiny bodies, their faces curious and unafraid. He realises that Bond for all his bloody missions has never seen a dead child. It makes him angry. Bond has seen enough horrible things to last a lifetime, and he doesn’t deserve any of it.

Q clenches his fists. “007, get up.”

“Q.”

When Q speaks, his voice is a terrible thing that he doesn’t recognise. “Damn you, James Bond. _Get up_ , and leave that bloody garage.”

“I can’t leave them here—“

“Then don't bother showing your face here again,” Q shouts at him, and after a long moment, he hears the slow stumble of footsteps and heavy breathing. Bond is almost too weak to lift the garage door again, but Q finally hears it slam back down.

“Are you outside? Are you outside? Take deep breaths. You’ve been exposed to carbon monoxide,” Q says in a rush, Bond replies “Yes yes, Q,” until the coast guard ships roar into the port.

 

Bond is in debriefings and psych evaluations all day when he flies back from the Philippines. Q has been looking forward with dread to their eventual meeting, so it worries him more than he should admit when Bond misses his scheduled check-in and then his usual annexing of Q’s tea breaks. He lingers in his office making and destroying prototypes for compact inexpensive gas masks till he has no excuse to stay and resigns himself to not seeing Bond till their next scheduled mission.

It’s overcast outside, a dank ugly mist that is too lazy to become a proper rain. Q doesn’t realise he’s being followed till he’s halfway to the tube.

“Going home, 007?” he murmurs.

The shape just beside his elbow materialises into Bond. Bond has always been far too stealthy for a man of such physical presence.

“Thought you might like some company,” Bond says. Q studies him out of the corner of his eye.

Bond’s frame resonates with coiled violence that he’s barely keeping in check with stiff-backed grace. Bond looks every inch the decorated military officer it proclaims in his file. He looks like he could do violence to himself or others at any moment, and Q knows he is not fit to be out in public and certainly not in  the teaming mass of commuters descending into the tube station.

“You’re not following me home. Like a stray,” Q adds when a corner of Bond’s mouth quirks out of habit. Q ignores him and keeps his eyes to the platform.

  “Do you doubt my ability to act professionally in regards to you?” Bond asks.

“Do I have a reason to?” Q argues and turns just in time to catch one of Bond’s particular smiles that only touches the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. It reminds him that Bond is abysmally older than him, and Q is merely a novelty in what must be a long line of quartermasters.

Q abruptly realises that he is staring and Bond is staring back, but the arrival of the train lets him break eye contact and occupy himself with the oncoming rush of elbows and briefcases as he squeezes himself into the car. He absolutely does _not_ glance around for Bond, who manages to find a place next to Q by the far door.

Bond tilts his head to let Q grab the strap dangling by his ear. Q’s wrist hovers near Bond’s cheek in a gross parody of a caress.

“No car today?” Q inquires as the doors close.

“No.” Bond’s hands lay loose and passive at his sides, but Q sees an enclosed smoky Lamborghini in the careful tone of his voice.

Q wonders what he will do when his stop comes up, whether he should leave and give Bond an inkling of where he lives or if he should remain in case Bond has an episode and murders half the poor civilians in the car. Q never asked for this sort of responsibility.

The train lurches, and Q almost brings up his hand on instinct to steady himself against the solid shelf of Bond’s shoulder. He resists, but it unfortunately brings him further into Bond’s space. Bond smells like antiseptic and blood and warm dusty sunlight.

“Alright?” Bond’s breath curls across Q’s cheek.

If Q were a woman, Bond might have tried to kiss him now, and Q would have let him get away with it. But the horrific mission in the Philippines has displaced Bond into an odd primal fugue state, flinging him out to sea without an anchor, and it is Q’s duty to be what Bond needs, not what he might want.

 “You aren’t disposable,” he blurts out and then intently studies the elegant slice of skin between Bond’s jaw and dark jacket collar until Bond turns his head, and he’s abruptly confronted with the jut of Bond’s chin.

Q moistens his bone-dry lips, and forces himself to meet Bond’s eyes. “What I mean to say is, don’t ever tell me you’re not coming back. Do you understand?”

Bond looks so genuinely bewildered that it makes Q ache. Without thinking, he reaches out to touch Bond’s elbow in a brusque awkward gesture of comfort.

They’ve never touched casually before apart from the occasional brush of fingertips when Q gives Bond his field kits and the single rare press of Bond’s thigh against his when they sat together on a bench in the National Gallery. It isn’t something Q has been aware of consciously cataloguing till now.

Q means to pull away immediately, but Bond turns halfway and curls one of his veined boxer’s hands around Q’s forearm, making the gesture into something solid and lingering. Q feels dwarfed by him, overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping this man alive.

He hasn’t been taking care of Bond, he realises. Rather, Q has been preoccupied with disassociating himself from Bond’s reputation, distancing and deifying Bond in absurd self-preservation, and in the meantime he’s been treating Bond like he does any other instrument at his disposal. Perhaps Bond has been unconsciously echoing the sentiment in his blatant disregard for all of Q’s precious carefully constructed field equipment.

Q stares at the shattered face of Bond’s expensive gold watch. He wonders if he and Bond should linger on the train till it’s just the two of them standing side by side silently sharing each other’s space. He decides he has no hurry to be home. “I’ll take care of you,” he promises.

Bond huffs in amusement and stirs the fringe of hair falling across Q’s forehead. “It is your job.”

“I don’t mean—“ But then the words die in his throat as Bond removes Q’s hand from his shoulder pries open the fingers. He retrieves the shattered vidlink from his pocket and places it in the square of Q’s palm. No doubt the other one is still dangling at the nape of Bond’s neck. 

Q’s hand clenches around it till he feels metal bite against his skin. He wants to shout at Bond for destroying yet another piece of Q-tech, but he’s painfully aware of becoming the potential root of the trigger that may well set Bond off. He’s never been afraid of Bond before.

Q clears his throat. “Yes. Thank you. The damage will be...taken care of.”

Bond inclines his head. “Sorry about your gadget, Q.”

“They’re not _gadgets_ ,” Q hisses despite himself, and Bond smiles with his teeth.

Bond’s inventory return improves after that, as if he has decided to end whatever suicide pact he made with Q’s inventions.


	4. Bugatti

Bond is certainly correct about two things: Q was not recruited as a student, and MI6 didn’t catch him breaking into their network. Actually, Q and MI6’s strike team bumped into each other in a very tragic comedy of errors when they were in the middle of hacking the same Iranian nuclear testing servers. MI6 arrested Q two days later, and M offered him the choice between rotting in prison and working for her. (M was a very enthusiastic proponent of the enemy-of-my-enemy school of thought as well as the effectiveness of the carrot and the stick.)

Q supposes everyone’s youthful indiscretions involved a certain degree of Interpol notices, destruction of evidence, and well-meaning terrorism.

The point is, Q knows Bond has been digging into his files for no other reason than he’s bored, but Q values his privacy and finds Bond’s nosiness in very poor taste. Being nosy is Q’s job. Shooting things is Bond’s. But instead of infiltrating Bond’s laptop and turning it into a glorified silicon paperweight, Q takes a page from M’s book and tries the carrot. He would like to think that he’s changed and become a better person, but better is a relative word when you once fancied yourself a god.

“M tells me I’m not to give you another palm-print Walther till you stop losing them,” Q lies to Bond at his next briefing. He slides Bond’s new gun across and rotates it so that Bond can see the blank grip.

“You could ignore him,” Bond suggests. “I am your responsibility, after all.”

“You are,” Q agrees and replaces the Walter with the upgraded version Bond is accustomed to. He keeps his hand on the muzzle as Bond reaches for it. “I want you to stop digging into my file.”

Bond looks delighted. “Bribery, Q?”

“Opportunity, 007.”

Bond leans in like a shark that has scented blood on the water. “It’s a poor incentive, however beautiful. Two guns would have been decent. Or three.”

“Now you’re turning into an extortionist,” Q complains. "I know better than that. You have a history of destroying beautiful things."

"Do I?" Bond's eyes skim over him. "I'll try to contain myself."

Q smiles back meanly. “Get out,” he says and doesn’t bother seeing Bond to the door. When he locks up the lab in the evening, he finds a second Walther missing along with two knives, half a pound of plastic explosives, and the packet of Hobnobs from Q’s desk. 

It’s the Hobnobs that’s the most disappointing, really.

Bond sends him a bill for a new laptop which Q doesn’t bother paying because Bond has never explained his own long history of destroyed and missing inventory that is somehow always misbilled to some other double-o’s account, and turnabout is fair play.

                            

The first time Q goes out drinking with Moneypenny, he falls asleep after only two shots of Stolichnaya because his team has been working long hours on a new internal security release and he has been subsisting on partially crushed digestives for the past few days.

He comes to in the taxi when she draws up his eyelid with pinched fingers and asks for his keys. (“You let Eve into your home?” 001 demands in horror when he tells her.) Facing Moneypenny the next week at lunch is mortifying, especially after she shows him the photos on her phone of him facedown at the pub with his insensate fingers still curled in a death grip around a full shot of whiskey.

Moneypenny teases him when she's tipsy. Q understands the full implications of the fact that she allows herself to be tipsy around him, and he's both honoured and overwhelmed by the responsibility. He has seen her outdrink men twice her size and walk away poised like a balanced gyroscope. She has let him see her giggle like a coquette after a few pints at the pub down the street from work.

She calls him Quintus and Quillian and once, horribly, Quigley.

When Q thinks of Moneypenny, he thinks of quantiles, because probability has always been some mysterious unknowable thing that confounds the domain of Q’s love for copper and cordite and nitro-glycerine.

When Q thinks of himself, he thinks of quines, code that self-produces like a blasphemous homage to the humble sponge and the rotifer. Computerised biology, a clever self-contained curiosity. Q is not a modest man. He knows he is clever, but he also knows that being a curiosity means that he is not seen as a man but as an idea stripped of his humanity, a faceless strut in MI6's scaffolding.

Of all the double-os, Bond is the only one who has never shouted at him like he was a thing that had decided to malfunction. There is a reason Bond always has the best Q-tech. Bond, the arrogant bastard, assumes it's because he is Q's favourite. Q appreciates that Bond assumes he is capable of petty human emotions like nepotism. (He is.)

When he thinks of Bond, he thinks of quasars, distant and incendiary.

 

MI6’s servers are in desperate need of a cleanup, and all of the documents Q has been digitising have added an extra burden they can’t afford. He’s developing a file structuring tool using a series of path algorithms that scan documents and house them in a distributed network based on keyword clusters. It will revolutionise the way MI6 stores, sorts, and finds their information, but the tool also has too many invasion of privacy and governmental overreach abuses to publically patent, more’s the pity.

Q supposes the rest of the world will just have to wait ten more years for someone else to invent an inferior distant cousin. If Q were more of an academic than an engineer, he might be concerned over intellectual property and credit.

Q’s been announcing a brief system shut down for weeks, so the sudden public outcry on the day of the install is completely unwarranted. Q has everything backed up on multiple servers, and he’s filed down the install time to three hours. That sounds like a century to anyone that doesn’t understand code (everyone), but Q has seen similar smaller initiatives on sparser servers go for days.

They’re almost through the brunt of the data repopulation. Q’s bodyguard and his new R are with him in the lab early morning on a weekend, the bodyguard because Q has not managed to lose him so far and R because Q is feeling bloody-minded and wants to inflict the pain of a late night code run on someone else.

Some of the other Q-branch regulars are milling in, all of them careful to give Q a wide berth and keep their teas in sight at all times. One of them makes the mistake of placing their tea on Q’s sacrosanct prototype bench.

“Don’t you dare—“ Q starts, and then tea sprays everywhere as one of the prototypes combusts and engulfs half the bench in flames. The bodyguard dives to shield the other scientists. Q stares, because he’s quite sure nothing on the bench was flammable.

"Where is the fire extinguisher?" R is shouting and wringing his hands.

Q's not-bodyguard shoves the man aside, seizes four of the teas, and smashes them onto the workbench, extinguishing the fire instantly.

Q’s workbench is covered with shattered ceramic and puddles of tea, but he always has valued presence of mind, however unconventional the means. He inspects the bodyguard. "What's your name?"

"Smithers, sir," the man says. It's the first time he's spoken to Q directly.

"You’re promoted to permanent technician, Mr. Smithers." Q meets R’s eyes and inclines his head to the door. R thankfully is capable of following those simple instructions without speaking.

The incident ruins the tail-end of their install. A few files are lost in the transfer—most of them from the psychiatry and medical personnel records, which can be easily recreated.

“Unfortunate business with your lab,” Maxwell remarks when Q visits him to ask after the missing files. He has papers going back for years, and the entire place is a firetrap, but MI6 employees are afforded their little eccentricities.

 _Dr. George B. Maxwell_ , it says on the brass plate on the door to his office. Moneypenny, Mallory, Maxwell. Q wonders whether this man was an M candidate too or if he’s in some order of papal succession. He’s never bothered with Maxwell aside from a single yearly psychiatric evaluation mandated by Mallory in the wake of Silva.

Maxwell’s lips move silently as he counts the files. “I wanted to thank you for your work with 007.”

“My work?” Q asks. “I haven’t done anything.”

“He listens to you. That is very rare.”Maxwell’s face is carefully neutral. “Bond is very fond of you.”

 “You’ve discussed me,” Q deduces. He doesn’t like where the conversation is going. He doesn’t have to read Maxwell’s notes to know what they say: paranoid, antisocial, approval-seeking. Q is the youngest quartermaster in MI6’s history for a reason.

“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” Maxwell reminds him, as if Q doesn’t know. “I can tell you that quartermasters are chosen very carefully. They’re selected to be brilliant, creative, autonomous. Historically, Qs have all the hallmarks of MI6’s best double-os. Did you ever wonder why you never became an agent?”

That is an easy answer. Q doesn’t have the physical strength or the stamina. He doesn’t have the requisite background in combat and firearms. The list goes on. But then he thinks of Bond sitting beside him in the car telling him to listen to the engine and react. “I don’t have the instinct,” Q replies.

Maxwell beams at him like Q is his favourite pupil. Q knows when he’s being patronised. “Yes, that’s very good. But you do have a certain instinct about 007, don’t you?”

This is news to Q, but he knows better than to betray it. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all,” Maxwell assures him. “It’s very rare for Bond to form attachments, though I can’t say I’m surprised. You fit a certain personality profile.”

“Profile?” Q asks, but then Maxwell looks guilty and practically throws Q out of his office.

“What a peculiar man,” Q remarks to Moneypenny later.

Moneypenny shrugs. “Maxwell’s spent too long by himself in his office with his inkblots. How is Smithers getting on, then?”

Aha. At the very least, the lab incident has made Moneypenny confirm however accidentally that she knows Smithers, which means she’s either personally acquainted with him or the orders to assign him to Q’s lab came from M’s desk. Smithers is certainly no ordinary lab technician.

Q wonders if he should tell Smithers that he knows, but Smithers would only shrug and go back to designing breadboard assemblies, so Q just spares himself the grief.

 

Q is given the fright of his life when he walks into Q-branch’s concept car garage the next morning to find Bond asleep in the driver’s seat of a shining sapphire Bugatti Sang Bleu.

Bond looks like hell. He’s haggard and dishevelled, and when Q stoops next to the open window, he can smell the sour tinge of alcohol that still lingers around him like a miasma. His jacket is tucked around his shoulders, and his bent knee is inches away from the button that controls the two modded rockets installed just below the headlights. Q tries to move his leg as gently as possible.

 “Fancy a drive,” Bond mutters, not even bothering to phrase it as a question.

 Q jumps and hits his head against the roof of the Bugatti. “Are you hungover?” he demands and coughs. “Good god, 007.”

He opens the door to pull Bond from his seat and take the keys from his pocket. Bond resists for a few moments before letting himself be led.

“Beautiful car,” Bond remarks. Q’s shoulder is at an awkward angle from supporting Bond’s weight, and the two of them shuffle down the hallway looking like entrants for a three-legged race.

“Thank you,” Q says, more politely than he wants to. “You missed check in yesterday. Am I to assume everything I gave you is destroyed?”

Bond huffs, which is no answer at all. “Glad to see Q-branch’s cars have regained some class. Seems I’ve given you a taste for it.”

The perfunctory salacious twist of his eyebrows should be too sloppy to make Q smile. He scans his security card and toes the lab door open. “You’re giving yourself far too much credit. Especially when the first time you abducted me in the Mangusta was an exercise in confronting me with my own incompetence.”

“I hardly think that’s possible.”

Q deposits him on the sofa in the corner of his lab. “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“You presume I have a place I intend to go,” Bond replies. “You’re like a bloody vault.”

That is entirely untrue. If Q were a weaker man, a less scrupulous man, he would let Bond get whatever he wanted and go wherever he pleased, but Bond trusts him, and Q won’t be another person in Bond’s life who abuses that trust.

Q tips Bond over till his head is pillowed on one of the armrests and his legs are in an awkward sprawl along the cushions. “You can sleep this off here,” Q says. “But just this once.”

Bond gazes up at him with bleary eyes. “This isn’t exactly how I imagined you putting me to bed.”

“007, shut up.” Q snaps open the stale but clean chequered blanket folded over the back of the couch and settles it over Bond’s shoulders before turning away to return to his work. He can feel Bond’s eyes on his back.

He texts Moneypenny immediately to keep her abreast of the situation, but it seems she already knows.

 _He was worried about you_ , she texts back a moment later, and he doesn’t even know how to respond to that. Bond doesn’t lose sleep over anyone—people lose sleep over him.

It’s never occurred to Q that Bond must have served under the old M for years, that his reckless streak was whetted by instilled disposability, a streak that is honed now into a particularly vicious kind of self-destruction. No one has ever made a promise to take care of him before, perhaps not since he was very young. Bond in his own completely fucked up way, has imprinted on him.

Moneypenny must take pity on him, because she adds, _Try to be kind._

 _I am kind_ , Q texts back, to which Moneypenny displays the nuanced depth and breadth of her knowledge of emoticons. Q is less than amused.

The next time he looks up from his computer, Bond’s eyelashes are heavy golden smudges against his cheeks, and one of his hands is curled around the blanket as if Q will decide to take it away. Q has to stop and process that Bond is sleeping, that Bond actually _sleeps_.

Bond is a relic in a young man’s game, and Q is a tiny fish in a big pond. They are both of them pretending to be people they aren’t.

A fringe of hair threatens the peaceful curve of Bond’s eyelids, but Q doesn’t brush it aside because he knows Bond is likely to jolt awake and break his wrist before he knows what he’s about. Instead of alarming him, Q feels an impossible wave of fondness.

 

Q finds Moneypenny at the firing range testing out the new prototypes. Her feet are apart, her posture is perfect, and she is shooting at the cut-out with cool professionalism. She’s certainly a better shot than Bond. She doesn’t shift her weight restlessly from foot to foot or fiddle with the guns.

He waits till she’s emptied out the magazine before attempting to approach her, but she pulls the ear muffs down around her neck and asks him to pass her another gun without looking at him as if she sensed he’d been there all along. A bandage on her arm peeks out from under the scalloped sleeve of her custard-coloured dress as she raises a Browning.

 “I thought you weren’t a field agent anymore, Moneypenny,” Q teases.

“005 asked me to teach basic defensive combat to the new recruits this morning,” Moneypenny says. “I don’t think they expected M’s secretary to thrash them.”

“What happened to your arm, then?”

“Letter opener.” She unloads the Browning and picks up one of the newly modded Berettas. She’s become the darling of the Q-branch ballistics testing lab, which suits both parties well. “Where were you today? Bond was looking for you.”

“I was working offsite for the upcoming Kuala Lumpur mission.” Q examines the guns arranged in rows on the sterile metal table, each pistol arranged like a surgical instrument. It really is in his own self-interest to be more terrified of Moneypenny. “I did cancel our check-in. I thought he would be ecstatic.”

“I was under the impression he wanted you to track him down,” Moneypenny replies.

Q rolls his eyes. “Bond can stand to debrief after one mission without seeing me.”

“No, he really can’t.” Moneypenny is wearing a beleaguered expression as she sights along her gun. Her finger hesitates on the trigger. "I don't involve myself in petty gossip, but if you must know, half this office thinks you and Bond are shagging."

“ _What?_ ” The air smells like cordite, and he gulps it down like a smelling salt. He sags against the metal table and imagines Bond pressing him against it, the force of his wide scarred hands and brazen smile. The thought is preposterous. "He would never...you know that I wouldn’t—“

"You’re alone with him an awful lot,” she points out.  “And you’ve been seen leaving the office together."

"For fuck’s sake,” Q says in exasperation. “He’s been teaching me to drive."

“To drive?” She must decide his excuse is pathetic enough to be true, because she continues, "MI6 has a number of good instructors on retainer."

"Well, I wanted to learn how to drive a car, not a fighter jet," Q says irritably. "Besides, I’m sure he thinks I'm liable to kill anyone else."

Moneypenny’s mouth crooks in a soft apology as she selects another gun. “Spies make for the worst gossips.”

Q watches her complete another row of guns. The bandage on her arm is spotty where fresh blood has broken the crust of scab and welled up to the surface. He lifts his glasses to knuckle his eyes. “Give me one of those guns. I need to shoot something.”

Moneypenny passes him a Walther short without a word, and he thinks that in another life he would be a little in love with her.


	5. Maserti Quattroporte

Bond is in Spain when he misjudges a throw and takes his assailant with him off the top of a wrought-iron Catalan balcony. Bond ends up with a dislocated shoulder, but the assailant that breaks Bond’s fall isn’t so lucky. Bond should not have been so lucky. It was Q that had told Bond to stay and M that ordered him to jump. Q receives a slight rebuke for contradicting M’s orders in a critical situation, and Q manages not to reprimand him right back for almost killing MI6’s best agent.

He’s become notoriously protective of Bond, he realises. Bond is always the first to receive Q’s newest prototypes and trackers, Bond always looks for him when he walks into a room. He can see why they could be mistaken for lovers. Sometimes he regrets not pursuing any one of Bond’s sly meaningless flirtations. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

MI6’s rumour mill can go hang, he decides and checks out a pair of keys from the garage.

Bond is just leaving MI6 when Q sidles alongside in the mango bronze McLaren MP4-12C that 005 has just checked back into the garage. Bits of Bond appear as Q pushes the button that opens the roof up and then back to fold into a nook behind the seats. Bond’s rumpled suit, the pristine new sling across his shoulder. The roof mechanism is all mechanical, and Q misses the physical disassembly of the targa top that would let him do something with his hands.

“You’ve been practicing,” Bond says in approval.

“I need to run field tests on the trackers,” Q explains lamely and doesn’t meet Bond’s eyes. After a beat, Bond opens the door left-handedly and climbs in, his usual sleek movements clumsy with the cast. He doesn’t say a word as Q takes them out of the city.

“This is a brute of a car,” Bond remarks as Q points them east.

“You two should get on, then,” Q said. He jerks his chin to the tablet in Bond’s lap. It’s currently showing a cluster of red dots on the A13 to Havering. “Tell me if any of those dots disappear or stop tracking us.”

“This car is wasted here,” Bond says. “You ought to take her out into the country.” He nudges one of the trackers with the toe of his shoe. Expensive Italian leather, no doubt.

“Stop that. It’s delicate,” Q scolds absently without looking away from the road.

“Not much use in the field if it’s delicate,” Bond replies. “I already have trackers on my phone.”

“These are biodegradable for burner phones,” Q says and then, belatedly. “Who said they were for you?”

 But he can’t deny that the idea came to him after watching Bond disposing of one phone after another while being chased across Turkmenistan. The trackers are heat-sensitive and degrade naturally next to the phone battery, erasing MI6’s thumbprint altogether.

“I won’t bother asking if they’re MI6 sanctioned.” A corner of Bond’s mouth puckers. “You already have the job, Q. There’s no reason for you to continue interviewing.”

Q grips the steering wheel. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

Bond doesn’t understand that obsolescence is hardly the sole purview of the double-os. Software and technology are a rat race. There’s always someone younger and cleverer just behind, and just because Q is the young clever thing now doesn’t mean he will be tomorrow.

The inevitability of time, Q had said himself once. “I’m the youngest quartermaster in the history of MI6. People talk. I’m not completely obtuse in the area of politics, 007.”

“Let them talk,” Bond says with all the care of someone who has been scandalising the public for years. “They’ve probably said much worse about you.”

“Thank you,” Q says dryly. “I feel much better.”

They stop near a park in Havering so Q can review the data. Bond perches on the bonnet of the McLaren, his good hand braced against the warm metal and his face turned up to the sun like a cat. Even with the sling and the visible jetlag, he’s easily one of the handsomest men Q has laid eyes on.

“Driving is a still chore, but this is nice,” Q grudgingly admits. He doesn’t even mention Bond’s incredibly obvious attempts to break into his tablet. Bond can’t help who he is, and Q might have even been a little insulted if Bond hadn’t tried to filch information.

Bond smiles at him with his eyes, and Q can’t help smiling back. He knows that Bond is a regret waiting to happen, and Q loves his job far too much to let Bond close, and he is too fond of Bond to keep him at arm’s length. Q is feeling warm and complacent from the uncharacteristically pleasant afternoon and the bottles of cold ginger beer that Bond bought for them along the way.

Bond isn’t wrong about the car. On the way back, Q accelerates with breathtaking speed to overtake a lorry along a long flat stretch of road. Q curses under his breath in grudging appreciation, and Bond lets out a short bark of laughter. His hand closes around Q’s on the gear shift as he lectures Q on high gears and low speeds, and Q can’t help but arch his wrist for a single point of contact with the little patch of blue veined skin just at Bond’s sleeve.

 

“Bond is looking cheerful,” Moneypenny comments. “I don’t like it.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be helping M promote a healthy working environment or whatever New Age rubbish he’s keen on?” Q asks.

Moneypenny tsks at him. “You are the last person to be casting aspersions on New Age.”

Mallory’s leadership is not all bad. Q can avoid the well-meaning psychiatric sessions, and the food at the commissary has certainly improved lately.  Lunch today is shrimp and penne in white wine sauce and florets of broccoli. Moneypenny’s portions of vegetables appear in the corner of Q’s takeaway box in large unsubtle quantities. She’s teaching herself to be picky. Normal people, she’s no doubt been informed, are picky about their food. And they don’t eat it like someone will take it away from them.

Moneypenny spears a shrimp with her fork. “He brought me back an ugly souvenir from Taiyuan. And when I threatened to hit him with it, he just smiled at me.”

The program Q is running on his mobile finishes with a tiny trill. He perches his fork against the small mountain of broccoli and then fishes his phone from his pocket. “Is that unusual?”

“You’ll see.” Moneypenny makes a moue of distaste as Q begins tapping at his phone keys. “Must you do that here?”

“M’s having me apply my big data pattern matching algorithm to the staff.” Q’s thumb stops at a piece of data about Smithers. He enlarges it and shows her the screen. Smithers and Xiaoli Ma (001)’s headshots beside each other with a single green thread between them. “Do you know that Smithers and 001 shopped at the same Tesco once last year? Do you think that’s just cause for investigation?”

“I think I should know as little about the details and legality of this project as possible,” Moneypenny says carefully. She does a perfunctory sweep across the document. “Grocery items, credit card info—Q, are you trying to get yourself sacked?”

“They can’t sack me,” Q tells her. His contract doesn’t allow for early termination unless he’s leaving for a very specific destination that he doesn’t want to contemplate at the present. He clears the screen and resumes the program. “Would you like to see what it says about you? You and 005 probably preferred similar guns on your missions.”

“Are you actually making a point or is this just a casual breach of privacy?” Moneypenny inquires serenely. “Because the CIA director is in this afternoon, and I would hate to tell M I had to break your phone to pieces because you were writing a dating game.”

“Sorry,” Q says and scrapes all of the broccoli back into her box. “I won’t keep you.”

Moneypenny sticks her tongue out at him and collects her things. He really has become a bad influence on her, he thinks with no little satisfaction and hopes she makes the CIA director cry at least once.

His phone pings again as he’s leaving the commissary, and Q looks down to find his own face staring back at him next to Bond’s. The threads span between them like a green spiderweb. Definitely cause for investigation, he thinks and deletes the map.

 

“Where’s my souvenir, then?” Q asks. He folds and then unfolds his arms, feeling alternately too secretive and too obvious. He wonders if the other Q-branch engineers will realise one of their big data records is gone, if they will take one look at Bond and him standing close together and deduce everything without mapping a single plot point.

“I rather thought I would be sufficient,” Bond comments.

“You won’t fit on my desk,” Q tells him severely.

Bond grins. “You don’t know until you try, darling.”

Q’s laugh makes a few heads look up. He tries to turn it into a cough and his new R looks wholly unconvinced but returns to her work.

Bond slides over a radio, the Walther, and a half-melted shell of the prototype Kevlar skin that Q-branch has been co-developing with the chemistry department. Armour as light and thin as aluminium with the full strength of a Kevlar vest. The younger romantically-notioned technicians want to call it mithril.

Q eyes a burnt out section high on the nanofibre ribbing and wonders if he can explain away the damage as a necessary stress testing. “How was the armour?”

“Saved me the trouble of getting shot,” Bond replies, but he’s favouring his side in the same location as the ravaged piece of ribbing.

Q sweeps the Kevlar armour to the corner of his workbench. “You’re doing a mission for the Americans soon, aren’t you? Moneypenny told me M is seeing the CIA director this afternoon.” 

“Woe betide the CIA director,” Bond jokes. “He’s terrified of her.”

“He tried to patronise her when they met, and she handed him his bollocks.” Q picks up the Walther, ejects the magazine, and checks the barrel. "In war you die once, but in politics..."

"I don't have the stomach for it," Bond grumbles, which might be the most entertaining thing Q has heard all day.

Bond turns in his false passport and papers and checks his pockets, his hands. His fingers twitch as he raises an arm to pull out his earpiece. His body is growing less resilient, retaining the memory of every injury instead of recovering from them. Souvenirs, Q thinks and despairs.

His eyes slide along the hunch of Bond’s shoulders. “I didn’t know you were burned,” he says quietly. “You’re supposed to tell me these things. Don’t make me threaten you with the vidlinks again.”

“Anything but those bloody things,” Bond replies immediately. “You promised me you’d scrapped them.”

 “I thought you liked my gadgets, 007,” Q says sweetly.

“They’re not gadgets,” Bond scolds him, but he’s smiling, and his eyes are half-lidded. He looks as if he’s perfectly content to stand in the middle of Q’s lab half-burned and exhausted and argue with Q over the finer points of technical jargon.

If this unsettled Moneypenny, then it terrifies the hell out of Q. He would be willing to take care of this man, he thinks. He would be willing to take him home, take him to bed, take him everywhere Q went so he would never be out of anyone’s sight again.

 

Mallory doesn’t declare the anniversary of M’s death an official half-day because a busy industrious MI6 is one M liked best, and she would have found any sort of commemoration pithy, sentimental, and a waste of time. The government holds a small remembrance in the afternoon. He, Tanner, Moneypenny, and M stand in the back in a dark-suited line and listen to a fussy man in an ill-fitting suit drone on about duty and patriotism and England’s continuing anti-terrorism agenda. M reluctantly goes forward with Tanner after the ceremony to offer his sympathies.

Moneypenny’s hand is tucked into the crook of Q’s elbow. It would be very cosy if they weren’t both in their official best—Q in a stiff dark tie with his hair combed flat and Moneypenny in a black dress with pinpricks of seed pearls around the collar.

These are the plots MI6 uses to bury their honoured dead. Q reads names off the gravestones as they pass: Williams, Thompson, Smith. All good strong English names, perhaps not the ones their owners were born with or died under. M’s grave is in the back among the hedges, and there’s a fresh bouquet of roses laid across it.

 _Devoted wife, loving mother_ the tombstone says, along with a name that is so foreign to Q that he feels like he is paying respects to a stranger. But this was M, cunning indomitable M, who should have been able to turn back death with a single icy word from her lips.

“Women are always buried as someone’s wife or mother.” Moneypenny’s voice is harsh, but her face is unusually rapt. “Were we her children, Q?”

 "I didn't know her very well,” Q blots the raindrops from his glasses. “She was closer to you lot. The double-os."

Moneypenny hmms and stares at M’s name. “She was never quite sure what to do with Bond either.”

“Are you implying that something should be done?” Q asks.

Moneypenny smirks. “What, you mean about the rumours that you wish were true?”

“ _Moneypenny_.”

Moneypenny laughs under her breath as if she feels guilty being cheerful in the presence of M’s grave. No one has ever spread sordid rumours about Moneypenny. The only things people whisper is that she’s in line to be the next M or that she _is_ the new M and Mallory is a decoy. Looking at Moneypenny now, Q is certain at least one of those is true.

“You can either ignore them or talk to Bond.” She tilts her head as Q flinches. “But I think you’ll choose to ignore it.”

“Why do you say that?” Q asks.

Moneypenny smiles. “Because when I presented those very choices to Bond, he decided he would teach you how to drive.”

“Oh,” Q breathes. And then, “ _Oh_.”

Moneypenny takes pity on him and ducks forward to airbrush a faint perfumed kiss against the top of his cheek. “I should go rescue M and Tanner. They’ll bring the car around soon.”

“Yes,” Q says. “Go on. I’ll catch up.”

A breeze stirs leaves against the tombstones, and the phantom shape of Moneypenny’s mouth lingers against his skin. If he didn’t know any better, he would say the cemetery was making Moneypenny feel sentimental, an accusation too ghoulish to even voice. He wonders if she recognises any of the names on the tombstones.

He reads M’s inscription again. Devoted wife, loving mother. He tries to think of M as a person stripped of her connotations of family and duty, but he doesn’t think she would mind being a personification of her livelihood. In many ways, she had _been_ MI6. She had been married to England, and MI6 had been her child. Bond had been her child, and what kind of mother sent her son into a warzone every day? What kind of lover did the same?

An odd itch creeps down Q’s spine. He turns his head and says, “I should have known when I saw the roses.”

“Fancy yourself a detective, Q?” Bond replies. His suit is conservative with a grey silk pocket square and matching tie with a silver clip. He’s an impeccable composition of simple elegant lines, but simple is not a word Q would use to describe either Bond or M.

“What are you doing here?” Q asks. His heart betrays a quick little start. “If you’re looking for Moneypenny, she’s already gone.”

Bond tilts his head like a predatory bird. “You know, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Quincy or Quillian in this entire cemetery.”

“Unlike M, Q is an entirely random letter.” Q pauses. “Though it is somewhat of a coincidence, in my case.”

He has a brief image of his own tombstone, an elegant Q standing out like a single stark cyclopean eye. Quentin, Quantile, Quine _._ Devoted quartermaster, loving son. But his parents are dead, and he wonders if loving a ghost is the same as loving England.

(Maybe that’s the reason it would be so easy to fall in love with Bond, and so dangerous. Bond is both ephemeral and grimly enduring.)

“Does it get easier, the funerals?” Q asks. He toes at a dandelion and tips slightly in the soft springy grass.

“No.” Bond steadies him. His hand is warm and broad on Q’s back. Just a fraction too high to be intimate. “But you learn to take your comfort where you can.”

Q leans into Bond’s arm involuntarily till he remembers he shouldn’t. “Are you trying to comfort me, Bond? Is that why you’re here?”

“I wanted to ask you to lunch,” Bond says. “But if you would rather be comforted, I’m sure I can accommodate.”

Q bites back what feels like the first smile he’s cracked all day, and Bond looks very pleased with himself.

The company car is already gone when they reach the main road. Bond has driven to the cemetery in a gorgeous silver Maserati Quattroporte that’s sleekly chic on the outside and comfortably earthy on the inside. Q runs his hands over the rich mahogany leather and bronzed tooling and thinks to himself that he could stand to own a car like this.

“Do you think we’ll be buried here one of these days?” Q asks.

“I rather think I’m the one of the two of us that should be preoccupied with death,” Bond says.

“I’m always preoccupied with your death,” Q murmurs. “You know, Maxwell said something very peculiar the last time I met him.”

“Oh?”

“He says that I fit a certain personality profile.” He turns his head as Bond ducks close. “I think he meant to say I’m your type.”

“Am I your type, Q?” Bond inquires warmly.

“I think that you emotionally compromise me,” Q says.

“Those are very pretty words, emotionally compromise.” Bond leans across the console and cups Q’s face with one hand. Q’s breath catches in his throat as Bond sweeps a thumb down his cheek, pressing gently. The tip of his finger comes away shining with the thin veneer of Moneypenny’s plum lipstick. “Kissing MI6’s finest, quartermaster?”

“Jealous?” Q whispers.

“ _Yes_ ,” Bond growls, and all the air empties from Q’s lungs. His hands come up to seize the lapels of Bond’s jacket, and Bond’s head is already tilting forward with his arms braced on either side of Q, boxing him in against the seat.

Q meets him halfway.

When he’s thought of Bond kissing him, he’s imagined a grand orchestration like the one of the operas Bond pretends to enjoy. He’s never imagined the ungraceful angle of Bond’s neck, his hands tucked against Q’s shoulder blades. Bond's lips cradle his softly. He breathes into Q’s mouth like he's reviving him. Like he adores him. Q has never been adored. He lets Bond lean in for one shallow kiss and then another. The tip of Bond’s tongue flicks against his, and Q chases it.

Bond makes an appreciative noise. “We’re very long overdue for an affair,” he purrs.

“It will have to wait,” Q says reluctantly. He closes his eyes as Bond tips up his chin to mouth along his jaw. “M wants you on the earliest flight to China, and then...mm, the Americans have called in some bloody favour. But after that. I want...I want to—“

Bond hmms with laughter. “Whatever you want, Q.”

Q smiles. “Whatever I want.” He grabs Bond by the back of his neck and holds him there against his mouth for a long moment before pulling away. Bond lets out a tiny involuntary sigh.

“What if I don’t want to have an affair?” Q whispers. “What if I want to keep you?”

Bond touches their foreheads together. “Then you’ll have me,” he promises.

Q’s mouth is tingling, and his breath is coming in short. “Take me home, Bond.”

Bond leans in to steal another kiss and then squeezes Q’s shoulder. “Yes, alright.”


End file.
